Dr. Howard Grimes is CEO of the Cybersecurity Manufacturing
Innovation Institute (CyManII), a Department of Energy–funded institute
delivering resilient cyber assurance for America's critical infrastructure,
manufacturing, and critical minerals sectors. CyManII leads a national team of
300+ scientists and engineers from academia, DOE national laboratories, and
private industry to design, build, and deploy secure, defensible architectures
— powered by formal methods and AI — that strengthen security while driving
measurable gains in productivity. One flagship solution, the Cyber Physical
Passport, embeds AI-driven analytical rigor, formal methods, and cyber-informed
engineering into system design, building on the vision Grimes laid out with Dr.
Tom Kurfess in The Role of the Digital Thread for Security, Resilience, and
Adaptability in Manufacturing (National Academy of Engineering: The Bridge
51(1), 2021). Grimes's career began at the lab bench, studying carbon and
nitrogen metabolism in plants. His discoveries include the mechanism behind
non-Michaelis-Menten sucrose uptake in plant cells, the role of lipoxygenases
as nitrogen-storage proteins during vegetative growth and seed development, the
first functional evidence linking lipoxygenases to a specific plant cell type
(the paraveinal mesophyll), the discovery that plant vacuoles shift between
lytic and storage functions via transitions in Tonoplast Intrinsic Proteins
(TIPs), and the first X-ray crystallographic structure of plant lipoxygenases.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) for these contributions. Moving into research administration,
Grimes shifted his scholarship toward international IP management, developing
new approaches to patent pooling to speed technology transfer to the developing
world. Work that began in agricultural IP evolved into pharmaceutical
engagements that helped inform the medical patent pools later used to expand
HIV medicine access across Africa. He spent over 20 years on the faculty at
Washington State University, serving as Vice President for Research and Dean of
the Graduate School — growing the research portfolio from roughly $120M to over
$500M in under five years while the Ph.D. graduation rate grew more than
fivefold — before moving frontier science into industrial application as
Director for Innovation and Industry Partnerships at DOE's Idaho National
Laboratory, and subsequently at UTSA, where his work as Principal Investigator
on a major DOE contract led to the founding of CyManII.